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22-Apr-1977
Dear Cecil:
Do you know anything about "subliminal advertising"? Supposedly, they can flash
a message, like "Buy right now!", real quickly in a commercial, so we viewers
don't know it, but it registers in our subconscious and we do what we're told. Is this
technique really used? Does it work? --J.C., Phoenix
Dear J.:
On September 12, 1957, a market researcher named James M. Vicary called a press conference
to announce the formation of the a new corporation, the Subliminal Projection Company,
formed to exploit what Vicary called a major breakthrough in advertising: subliminal
stimuli. Vicary described the results of a six-week test conducted in a New Jersey movie
theater, in which a high speed projector was used to flash the slogans "drink
Coke" and "eat popcorn" over the film for 1/3,000 of a second at
five-second intervals. According to Vicary, popcorn sales went up 57.5 percent over the
six weeks; Cokes sales were up 18.1 percent.
Vicary's announcement immediately touched something like a national hysteria. Outraged
editorials appeared in major magazines and newspapers; outraged congressmen drafted laws
and made themselves available for outraged interviews. This was the year of Vance
Packard's best-selling expose of the advertising industry, The Hidden Persuaders, and the
public was apparently willing to believe anything about Madison Avenue--1984 was just
around the corner.
Overlooked in all the hullaballoo were Vicary's own relatively modest claims for his
invention. It was useful only as a reminder, he said, and couldn't persuade anyone to do
what they didn't want to do in the first place. But even he was probably overstating the
case. While Vicary steadfastly refused to release any of his data (or even the location of
the theater where the tests were conducted), psychologists who had performed similar
experiments gleefully contradicted his results. A weak stimulus, they said, produced a
weak impression; the subliminal "message" was no more hypnotic than a slogan on
a billboard glimpsed out of the corner of the eye.
Moreover, Vicary's ideas were hardly new. A subliminal projector called a tachistoscope
had been used during World War II in training soldiers to recognize enemy aircraft, while
a book published in 1898 (The New Psychology by E.W. Scripture) laid out most of the
principles of subliminal response.
Still, the panic over subliminal "brainwashing" continued. In January of 1958,
Vicary agreed to conduct a publicly announced test over the Canadian Broadcasting Company
stations. The message "telephone now" was flashed 352 times during a half-hour
show, but there was no noticeable increase in telephone use during or after the program.
Instead, the CBC received thousands of letters reporting unaccountable urges to get up and
get a can of beer, to go to the bathroom, to change the channel--not a single viewer
correctly guessed the message.
Since the technique apparently wasn't working, the advertising industry felt free to
denounce it (and help repair some of the image problems brought on by Packard's book).
Subliminal ads were banned by the American networks and by the National Association of
Broadcasters in June of 1958. A proclamation that subliminal ads were "confused,
ambiguous, and not as effective as traditional advertising" issued by the American
Psychological Association finally laid the controversy to rest, one year almost to the day
after Vicary's historic press conference.
In 1962 Vicary granted an interview to Advertising Age in which he called his invention a
"gimmick"--the Subliminal Projection Company had been dissolved, and he was
working in happy obscurity for Dunn and Bradstreet. Eleven years later, though, the
subliminal pitch made an unexpected comeback. A commercial for a game called
"Husker-Do" was found to contain the phrase "get it" flashed four
times (one frame each) during its 60 seconds.
The manufacturer, the Pican Corporation of Los Angeles, expressed horror and surprise,
withdrawing the ads (which, of course, violated the NAB code) and writing the whole thing
off to an overzealous copywriter in Cincinnati. But the company's scruples apparently
didn't extend to countries where there were no regulations against subliminal ads: in
1974, the spots appeared on Canadian television. More outrage followed, and subliminal ads
were quickly (if pointlessly) outlawed in Canada.
--CECIL ADAMS
The Straight Dope / Questions or
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